Why is the Matilda called an Infantry Tank

[Robert Olesen]

when it only carries AP ammo?

I thought it was used in a close support role, but it seems that I'm wrong.

Was it actually attached to infantry divisions? If so, why no HE ammo?

[flamingknives]

Because it is slow and well armoured so as to move with the infantry. British tank doctrine was that the MG was a tank's primary anti-personnel weapon, whereas the main gun was intended to engage other armour in cloase range, swirling melees.

An assault tank, firing high calibre HE, was intended for attacking fortified positions, but was never implemented.

[Rabidbvr]

Hello one and all

The Matilda was called an infantry tank as it was to support the infantry... British doctrine of the time was to use the mg as its main weapon and advance with the infantry to the target the gun(ap ammo) was then to be used to defend against any armor counter attack as with most early british tanks the MG was the main weapon

good info site

http://www.wwiivehicles.com/html/britain/matilda.html

happy hunting

[MikeyD]

The opposite of the Matilda would be the Crusader. Much much lighter armor, much much faster. Used for rapid exploitation after the Matilda has helped the infantry breech the hard outer shell of enemy defenses... in theory.

Has anyone actually tried playing a game using this doctrine? Keep the Crusaders back until the Matildas and infantry have done their work? CMAK's (often) restricted map sizes and (often) limited timeframe may be a hinderance to keeping to strict tactical doctrine.

[ February 27, 2004, 03:50 PM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[Bone_Vulture]

Originally posted by MikeyD:

Used for rapid exploitation after the Matilda has helped the infantry breech the hard outer shell of enemy defenses... in theory.

Yeah, "in theory"... Maybe because the Crusader front armor can be pierced with a measly 37mm flak.

[Denwad]

yeah, they're pathetically funny in WWIIOL, it's practically the only thing the Pak-36 can kill from the front.

[flamingknives]

Weird. I've just finished a QB where they were bouncing 50L42 at 1000m.

I quite like the crazy little things.

The best infantry tank is the Valentine - small and packing some decent firepower without being too pricey. Mobile ATGs

[MikeyD]

"The best infantry tank is the Valentine - small and packing some decent firepower without being too pricey."

And with my mods, pretty too!

(shameless, shameless plug )

[Robert Olesen]

Thanks, that was pretty clear - amd the wwiivehicles site looks promising.

It looks like it wasn't actually part of the TO&E of an infantry division - is that correct? Was it part of tank units that were then attached to infantry divisions?

[DaveR]

The distinction between Infantry tanks and Cruiser tanks is aimed at a higher level then regimental level. Both types were part of Royal Armoured Corps units and not attached to infantry divisions, other then on a temporary basis.

The British armour doctoring was based on the premise that any future war would be fought like the First World War, where there would be long periods of static trench warfare.

The baisc idea, as mentioned in an earlier post was that the, slow moving but hevily armoured, Infantry tanks would punch a hole in the enemy lines, then the fast cruisers and tankettes would burst into the enemy rear area.

World War 2 showed that the basic premise of static warfare was not the case. But the British Army, even now, was reluctant to change the basic doctoring which it's armour tactics were based on.

The idea of the Infantry tank wasn't dropped until quite late in the war, with the Churchill series being the last of the Infantry tank types. The argument shifting to Infantry tanks with their extra Armour being ideal for town/city fighting. This shift in thought was never realy accepted due to the improvements in infantry usable anti-tank weapons which would make close quarter fighting a deadly affair for any tank.

The idea of the infantry tank was only finally dropped in the latter stages of WW2 with the advent of the Centurian range, this following the realization, finally, that tanks needed to be heavily armoured and armed and be able to show a good turn of speed if they were to be able to go toe to toe with the German Tigers.

[sand digger]

The Centurion was an excellent infantry support tank and performed that role for many years after WW2. But its engine was powerful enough, and its transmission and suspension capable enough, so that it could be used as a main battle or universal tank, although it was not the fastest MBT around by a fair margin.

[flamingknives]

The Centurion was classified as a Cruiser tank, but the intention was to create a universal tank, AIUI.

[Sergei]

I'd like to add to all that has been said, that the original Matilda I only had machineguns so it really wasn't useful against tanks.

[Rabidbvr]

Hello one and all

Mat MKI pic for you

used .50 or 303 mg as main gun and the tracks looka little exposed for comfort...

happy hunting

[Rabidbvr]

hello one and all...

here is a little site you may like loads of Mat stuff most MKI take a look

http://www.armourinfocus.co.uk/a11/

happy hunting

[Mark Gallear]

DaveR has explained it quite well. Tank warfare upto WW2 was very much unkown country, there was no concept of the Main Battle Tank to do all jobs. Different countries had different ideas – some favoured massive land cruisers with multiple turrets to dominate the battlefield. The US Army, which had little interest in armoured warfare, had the proto idea of lightly armoured and fast turreted tank destroyers racing about the battlefield doing the tank killing, whilst tanks themselves would punch through the infantry line. In much, the same way as Germany had the concept of light, medium and heavy Panzers doing different job so did British Army doctrine, which was largely aimed at dealing with WW1 style trench warfare.

Infantry tanks were to be heavily armoured and were only required to be slow moving as they would move and support infantry. The Matilda I only had a MG as it was made on a budget. A 3inch gun firing HE would have been preferred but a MG had to do.

The Matilda 2 had a 2pdr and only a small proportion of the 2s were included in the BEF in 1940, in much the same way as CS tanks would deal with the odd AT gun and bunker they were there to deal with the odd tank. The idea for this group of tanks was to punch the hole through the enemies trench system.

The Cruiser class were lightly armoured fast tanks that were designed to deal with enemy armour through high mobility. This class primarily had AT guns - the 2pdr, but a few per squadron were equipped with 3inch guns to lay down smoke to cover the approach of the attack. The first British cruiser tank also had two MGs in turrets had had originally been envisaged as an Infantry tank. (I still think CM underestimates the modelling of the power of the MG against soft targets and why they insist that the 2pdr has to have had a fictious HE round supplied.)

The Cavalry tanks such as the light Vickers were meant to exploit the breakthrough in the trench line much as the cavalry of old had done. They were not meant to do reconnaissance but these tanks proved in battle to be so poor they were of no use for anything else.

Only just, before WW2 did the British Army resurrect the idea of the Armoured Car squadron and the single regiment was sent to France. (Old designs were used ad hoc in India and the Middle East to deal with native uprisings and banditry).

Actual battle experience found the doctrine wanting in many ways, some Infantry tanks such as the Valentine ended up being used as Cruiser squadrons in the desert. Almost all the Matilda 1s were lost in France and there appeared little point making anymore so the Matilda 2 immediately took over the job as the main Infantry tank. The Cavalry concept for a while had a resurecuction with the arrival of the Stuart, but by 1944, such light tanks were no longer grouped together in squadrons and were used primarily for reconnaissance. Shermans were sometimes classed as Medium tanks rather than Cruisers and were the nearest thing to the MBT on the WW2 battlefield. Germany slowly dumped the light tank, and the primary purpose of the heavy tank went from dealing with infantry, to a heavily armoured tank killer similar to the concept of the modern MBT.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Robert Olesen:

Thanks, that was pretty clear - amd the wwiivehicles site looks promising.

It looks like it wasn't actually part of the TO&E of an infantry division - is that correct? Was it part of tank units that were then attached to infantry divisions?

Some points that the replies so far seem to have missed:

1. Most armies had the concepts of "infantry" and "cavalry" tanks before WW2. The British Army called them "I" tanks and cruisers; the Americans called them tanks in the infantry and combat cars in the cavalry; the French called them chars legers, chars moyens or chars de bataille in the infantry and chars de cavalerie or automitrailleuses in the cavalry; and the Russians distinguished independent tanks from close and distant infantry support tanks.

2. The British Army made a brief attempt, in 1942, to include tanks in the orbat of something like a normal infantry division. Five "mixed" divisions were formed in the UK by replacing one of the infantry brigades of an infantry division with a tank brigade. The idea didn't last, and all were changed back in 1943. [source: George Forty, "British Army Handbook 1939-1945", Alan Sutton, 1998].

3. In British Army usage of the WW2 period, a "tank brigade" and an "armnoured brigade" are different things. A tank brigade (early in the war called an "army tank brigade") is always an independent brigade with an infantry support role, and one would expect it to be equipped with "I" tanks (also sometimes called "army tanks"). An armoured brigade, on the other hand, one would expect to be equipped with cruisers, and operate as part of an armoured division or independently. So, for example, 6th Guards Brigade was known as 6th Guards Armoured while it was part of the Guards Armoured Division, and changed to 6th Guards Tank Brigade when it left it and assumed an infantry tank role as an independent brigade (and none of its elements ever belonged to the RAC, following the principle that "A Guardsman is always a Guardsman").

All the best,

John.

[gunnergoz]

In the US they were called "combat cars" because the politics and military bureaucracy of the day insisted that all "tanks" belonged to the infantry arm. Cavalry could only get their hands on full-tracked combat vehicles by the workaround of calling them something else. This sort of (now) ridiculous nit-picking deprived the US of a truly viable armored doctrine throughtout the war that was to come. We ended up with light tanks, mediums and tank destroyers as a result. No one could come up with a successful "heavy" tank so we didn't field one the whole war (the M26 was described as a "medium" by the time it was out in numbers, although compared to the M4 it certainly was a "heavy." It's actual enemy counterpart was the Panther in German useage, making the medium description valid.

It's a lot of fun to wonder what might have happened if some of the old US army rigid-thinkers had been set aside somehow and the young turks like Patton and Chafee been allowed to build us a real modern armored force.

[Gerry Chester]

Originally posted by DaveR:

The distinction between Infantry tanks and Cruiser tanks is aimed at a higher level then regimental level. Both types were part of Royal Armoured Corps units and not attached to infantry divisions, other then on a temporary basis.

The British armour doctoring was based on the premise that any future war would be fought like the First World War, where there would be long periods of static trench warfare.

The baisc idea, as mentioned in an earlier post was that the, slow moving but hevily armoured, Infantry tanks would punch a hole in the enemy lines, then the fast cruisers and tankettes would burst into the enemy rear area.

World War 2 showed that the basic premise of static warfare was not the case. But the British Army, even now, was reluctant to change the basic doctoring which it's armour tactics were based on.

The idea of the Infantry tank wasn't dropped until quite late in the war, with the Churchill series being the last of the Infantry tank types. The argument shifting to Infantry tanks with their extra Armour being ideal for town/city fighting. This shift in thought was never realy accepted due to the improvements in infantry usable anti-tank weapons which would make close quarter fighting a deadly affair for any tank.

The idea of the infantry tank was only finally dropped in the latter stages of WW2 with the advent of the Centurian range, this following the realization, finally, that tanks needed to be heavily armoured and armed and be able to show a good turn of speed if they were to be able to go toe to toe with the German Tigers.

Tank Supply Policy 1

Under this heading Winston Churchill wrote a 6-point memo dated 23rd April 1943. Written as a result of receiving positive reports on "his" tank, it was addressed to Sir Edward Bridges, Brigadier Jacob of Defence Committee (Supply) et al. An extract: "The idea of having a spear-point or battering ram of heavily armoured vehicles to break the enemy's front and make a hole through which the lighter vehicles can be pushed has a very high military significance."

This sound basic premise was not dropped, except when Montgomery (with his well-known antipathy to the Churchill tank) was Army Commander. If General Sir Oliver Leese had not assumed command of 8th Army, the breaking of the Hitler Line in less than a day would not have been possible

When properly deployed, the Sherman performed magnificently in the rôle of the "lighter vehicle" as she did at the Medjerda Valley in Tunisia and throughout the battles against strongly defended positions in Italy up to the assault through the Argenta Gap against the German Irmgard, Laura, Paula, and Genghiz Khan lines. In all these battles, the heavily armoured Churchill broke the back of the defences to allow the Shermans to exploit the success.

Incidentally, the first Tigers to be knocked out by another tank were by Churchills in Tunisia - the regiment in which I served, the North Irish Horse, bagging the first two. Churchills of the NIH were also the first tanks of the Western Allies to knock out Panthers.

1 The Hinge of Fate, Page 953. Churchill, Winston S.

[flamingknives]

Following a tangent, it was a Churchill that captured, more-or-less intact, the Tiger that now resides in Bovington Tank Museum.

[Gerry Chester]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

Following a tangent, it was a Churchill that captured, more-or-less intact, the Tiger that now resides in Bovington Tank Museum.

There is picture of her taken shortly after she was dsiabled. See:

http://www.geocities.com/vqpvqp/nih/addenda/germanarms.html#3

One of the chaps on her starboard side is L/Cpl Wallace, a fitter from B Squadron, North Irish Horse.

[Michael Emrys]

Now we know what YK2 really looks like. A sleek item, I must say.

Michael

[mrcoffee]

Hindsight is wonderful but we have to remember that tanks were being developed before and during WWII.

Tanks went from really light armored tracked vehicles with itsy bitsy guns to, by mid war, huge 40 ton and greater (churchill, tiger, panther, and maybe even the Shermans) tanks with a single turret and the heaviest frontal armor designers could get. I'd also like to point out that the very advanced german tanks didn't manage any sort of breakthroughs after Kharkov in 1943.

To me it seems all the mid, late, and post-war tanks evolved into remarkably similiar designs. Wide tracks, extremely heavy frontal armor, paper-thin side armor, the biggest diameter turret-ring to hold the biggest gun that could fit. Oh, and one thing more...possibly the most important. Most tanks weigh no more than the weight it would take to collapse a bridge.

I think this is in great contrast to what we saw in the aorospace industry whereby planes took radically different forms from each other.

[JasonC]

There is an enourmous amount of confusion, one sided accounts, revisionism, and oversimplification about interwar and early war tank doctrine, in all countries. Everyone has some pet theory about what eventually worked and why it was important, and regards everyone else as a hidebound straw man making some comical and easily avoided error, typically all the same one.

If all that were required to use tanks correctly were veering in a direction, as all these stories imply, nobody would have had poor tank doctrines and they would not have evolved so much. The reality is quite different. Nobody had it figured out in the fall of 1939. Multiple errors were made. And each of them spawned misdiagnoses, pet theories, that then went and made their own errors in some other direction. Meanwhile, half the things called errors afterward simply weren't. They were legacies of these straw man debates. Which get layered with service branch and national and personal rivalries, in addition to the doctrinal meat.

Tanks were invented in WW I by the Brits. They already had theorists, that early (1917), calling for massed employment of tanks as an independent arm. Understand that the problem was thought of as "restoring mobility to the battefield". WW I was thought of as an anomoly in the whole course of warfare, which "should" be based on maneuver to seize ground. This deeply engrained offensive military view was relentlessly and bloodily refuted by the practical realities of WW I. They spent years chasing the mirage of "breakthrough" while the reality was artillery based attrition.

Early tanks could not change this, despite the theorists being listened to. They retroactively carp about how they should have had this and that, but the fact is they were given an independent arm, massed armor, operationally employment, and all the rest of it. But they did not initially understand combined arms. And the tanks of the day were horribly things from a reliability and maintenance point of view. At Cambrai, 90% of the tanks employed broke down within a week.

Giant trench-crossers were the original idea. They carried MGs or light cannons through the enemy wire and over his trenches, silencing enemy machine gun posts by direct fire. They immediately had half a dozen problems. One, the enemy MGs just hid, and the tanks had zero visibility. Two, enemy artillery knocked some of them out by direct fire, where any got through. Three, they broke down in hours, particularly when trying to navigate shelled terrain and trenches etc. There was practically no coordination with any other arm.

Armor theorists sometimes leave out this part of the story, as though they never got a chance to show what they could do employed independently, before being tied to the infantry, and supposedly thus slowed down to a walking pace. Officers coming from cavalry backgrounds are particularly revisionist on this score. They continued to blame failure on "tying the tanks to the infantry", and wanted to be allowed to just drive off into the enemy rear. Where, in reality, a WW I tank would be off to the side of the road, broken down or out of fuel, in a matter of hours, to a day or two at most.

What the cavalry officers did get was fleets of light tanks, MG main armament, thought of as meant for "exploitation". (Small numbers of armored cars were used the same way in remote theaters; in primitive enough conditions (very weak enemies) they could be fairly successful). At Amiens in 1918, they even got a chance at breakthrough. The overall offensive was successful but tanks mattered only for the immediate break-in of the German trench system. The advance continued at a walking pace, hampered by terrain wrecked by shelling, by the inability of gun poor forces to compete with gun assisted ones, and by the dependence of the guns on rail supply for ammunition.

The basic cause of the static nature of WW I was not the trenches, or the slowness or vulnerability of infantry. That was a misdiagnosis of the issue. The basic cause was a mobility differential on the two sides of the front. Operating on one's own side, rail allowed rapid movement of men and material in effectively unlimited quantities.

Operating beyond the no man's land scar tissue belt, on the other hand, depended largly on manpacking. No vehicles could negotiate the intervening ground, not for a single passage, but repeatedly for logistics. Rail lines do not lay instantly. The vehicles used from railhead to front were horsedrawn, and horses do not work effectively in barrage zones. A few motor vehicles could not make up for these limits over a limited and shell-holed road net.

As a result, the enemy front line could be not only entered, but entirely carried, through all 3-5 belts of its depth, and nothing of operational significance would follow from it. The enemy could still rail in reserves faster than the attackers could get forces across. Fighting at the limits of the penetration, the attackers had rifles and grenades, the defenders had 6 to 8 inch artillery and dug in machineguns. Such fronts were "self sealing". To carry a single trench was difficult, to carry 3 faster than the enemy could dig a new one almost impossible, and even achieving that resulted in a 10-50 miles movement of the front but no decision.

The reality was that WW I era tanks were not yet technically capable enough to change any of this, and they were plugged in to a logistic system geared for rail, not automotive, movement. Which inherently favored artillery firepower and attrition strategies, and a tactical defensive stance. But this was poorly understood, largely because it was not acceptable in its human consequences, and officers found the reality of it intensely frustrating. They substituted wishful thinking for facing the reality.

This contributed to a large front to rear command "disconnect", that wasted hundreds of thousands of men in fruitless quixotic attempts at "decisive breakthrough". After Ypres, one staff officer visited the front for the first time since posting there. He saw the mud the artillery had created, for the first time. "We sent men to fight in *that*?" was his reaction. It was news to him, a month after the battle.

The interwar period can only be understood if one realizes this prior fight had already taken place. And the naive faith in the offensive power of massed tanks employed alone expressed by the cavalry minded has already been tried and had been completely unsuccessful in practice.

Tanks had proved useful. But the key to their effective use had been combined arms coordination. Especially, they had to work with infantry to force enemy MGs and such to show themselves, so the tanks could deal with them - or to allow the infantry to clear with grenades those hiding from the tanks. (Secondarily, coordination with artillery helped deal with enemy guns using direct fire against the tanks. But this was not achieved interactively, due to communications limits. A rolling barrage could create the necessary effect).

Infantry and artillery minded officers coming out of that whole experience viewed the cavalry minded as refuted hotheads deluded by a glamour they attached to speed, that was no more than wishful thinking and had failed in practice due to lack of combined arms. They wanted to subordinate tanks to ordinary infantry-heavy formations and use them all along the line to support all-arms attacks. Cavalry minded armor officers, on the other hand, viewed the failure of tanks to achieve decision in WW I as everybody else's fault. They hadn't been given their chance (this was factually untrue, but widely believed). Their immediate post-war mantra was to mass the tanks, and use them alone, not "tied" to the infantry.

In reality, both of these doctrines were wrong. The infantry minded were entirely correct about the importance of combined arms - which the cavalry minded did not admit. Failure to achieve real combined arms coordination made for spectacular failures, losing entire tank brigades in a single afternoon to no purpose, as late as 1942. But it was important to mass the tanks.

The cavalry minded were right to stress massing the tanks on narrow sectors and putting them in the driver's seat, as it were. But they were entirely wrong about "cutting the tanks loose" from infantry and artillery. It was not enough to veer in a direction. But only the infantry branch really understood combined arms, and only the cavalry branch really understood operational massing and exploitation.

So how did the various countries deal with all of this? Far from having one bad idea and sticking with it, most of them tried all of them and dissipated their efforts as a result. The French had half of their tanks in independent battalions, regiments, and brigades meant to support infantry divisions. They also had light tank brigades meant to be employed en masse like cavalry. They also had a few light armor combined arms formations. And a few very tank heavy full armor divisions, like fleets of land battleships. The revisionists often reduce this to "infantry thinking, penny packeted all along the line". But the French had pure ADs as big as the Germans used, and combined arms legere divisions as integrated as later PDs, and behind every German breakthrough they had brigades to corps to throw in to immediate counterattacks. They just didn't have any unified doctrine. If the war had been the one the infantry doctrine envisioned, they would have done OK without. Obviously it wasn't.

The Brits on the other hand were much more heavily in the cavalry thinking camp. Fuller had been an early proponent of this view. They tended to think pure armor was the way to go. The infantry tanks were a hold over, a poor second sister, within the British armor force. They were a concession to hidebound outsiders who did not understand that masses of crusier tanks operating alone would decide wars by deep slashing exploitations. Which in practice became Pickett's charge affairs that lost entire brigades in half a day.

The Germans made the British mistake, before Poland. Guderian - originally a motorized signals unit officer - had discovered the importance of communications and motorizing all supporting arms in interwar tests. That was their major innovation. It gave them something approaching combined arms at the speed of the tanks. But the PDs themselves were still extremely armor heavy, way too heavy for real combined arms effects.

In practice, better commanders discovered this for themselves during the Polish campaign. They used supporting motorized infantry divisions to flesh out combined arms, or worked with full leg infantry divisions for particular attacks. Infantry formations were used in deep column behind the PDs, to hold what they took and inundate units penetrated by the PDs. By the time of the French campaign some of this worked itself out, by experimenting with TOEs. They used several light divisions in France, which were too armor light, alongside PDs that were still too armor heavy.

By the time of the Russian campaign, they had found about the right mix of armor to infantry in the PDs. They did so in part to increase the number of PDs overall. The number of mediums in a PD remained about the same, while the number of lights fell dramatically, as the whole force transitioned to mediums. So, in Poland and France they had used a "cavalry doctrine" force by later war standards. The median tank in France was a Pz II.

The Germans went through a familiar process on the issue of tanks fighting tanks, exploitation doctrine, and tank armament. Understand that cavalry doctrine had stressed speed and exploitation, not combat power. The Germans used small numbers of Pz IVs with short 75s as artillery support for the tanks, but most of them fought as mobile machinegun nests, and antitank ability was an afterthought.

German anti-tank doctrine in this period was based on the WW I experience that guns firing direct stopped tank attacks. What later became the PAK front was an extension of this idea. When the Brits counterattacked at Arras in France, Rommel's entirely doctrinal counter was based on battalions of divisional 105s firing direct, along with a handful of 88s and the 37mm PAK from divisional AT battalions. Every division had an antitank battalion, originally with quite light pieces, dedicated to this, but supplimenting them with div arty was entirely normal.

Against very light early war tanks this worked fine. But the French also had Char-Bs. And these bounced 37mm AP easily. The Germans put in for better PAK and for gun upgrades for the Panzers, most of which had 20mm or 37mm main armament. The ordnance department turned down the initial call for 50L60 guns for the Pz III, because the tank's mission was cavalry-like, exploitation and fighting soft enemy targets, not enemy tanks. So a 50L42 with the same HE was thought adequate. Remember, these are the guys who are in the lead, doctrinally, in the period of their greatest successes. It is not like Guderian figured it all out before 1939.

The general purpose tank that made clear to the Germans they could not get by with a cavalry and exploitation armor doctrine was the Russian T-34. The Char-B and Matilda had been just as tough armor-wise, and could penetrate anything the Germans had at the time. But both were slow infantry tanks. But the T-34 had greater cross country mobility than a Pz III, better protection than a Char-B, the HE firepower of a Pz IV, and in 1941 sufficient AT ability to kill any German tank at medium range. It set the standard for what *not* to compromize over. Tankers could demand all of the above from the designers and factories, rather than limping along with special purpose items for every tactic.

Understand that the Russians were doctrinally in about the same position as the French. They had every doctrine and thus none. They had flocks of cavalry tanks meant to be used en masse for exploitation - BT series - but without sufficient combined arms to work in practice. They had giant land cruisers to smash through enemy trench systems - KVs - but penny packeted as infantry support tanks. They did not know how to use the T-34 yet. But they had the tool, and the Germans quickly showed them what fleets of such things could do, as parts of all arm, corps sized formations.

The US had plenty of armor development in the interwar years. It is revisionist projection to claim otherwise. They were not ahead of the Germans, but that isn't saying anything - nobody was, and the US army was a tiny, starved thing that occasionally sent horse cavalry into Mexico to chase bandits. Patton was charging "bonus marcher" squatters in depression era Washington DC riots, on horseback, with sabers.

Still the US came out of it with the Stuart, reflecting cavalry tank doctrine, and the Grant, reflecting infantry tank doctrine. The former compares favorably with the Pz IIs, 38s, and early IIIs the Germans used to conquer most of Europe. The latter is a more mobile Char-B, with better communications etc. By 1942, the US had in the Sherman a general purpose medium about as good as the T-34, or the Pz III and IV series, the other major powers were using then. And years ahead of British Crusaders and Valentines.

Nor was US doctrine on fighting enemy tanks with tanks any different from the stages the Germans went through. The US just went through them later, having entered later. The US used M-10s much as the Germans used Marders, and rather more successfully. The US saw the need to upgun Shermans to 76mm, but was slow about it in practice, much as the Germans saw the need to upgun IIIs and IVs, eventually abandoning turreted IIIs to get a decent gun. The US developed a vastly improved heavier tank after that process ran its course - but the war ended before the Pershing got as old as the Panther.

The anomoly that caught the initial poster's eye, however, is the fact that even the main British I tanks were armed with 2 pdrs firing AP. This largely reflects the dominance of cavalry thinking and the cruiser arm within British armor force circles. Understand, the existence of infantry tanks was a concession to (branch) outsiders and their ideas of the role of tanks. If they had really believed in infantry tank doctrine they would have made things like the Char-B or the Grant - large HE chuckers. Instead they had just a few 3 inch CS versions.

[ April 07, 2004, 04:01 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[flamingknives]

Radically different 'planes?

All sides ended up with single-engined, monoplane fighters of monocoque, aluminium, construction with wing mounted machine guns and/or cannon and, more often than not, V12 engines.

Even today, modern fighter-bombers do not differ that much from each other.

When you look at what a tank is required to do, there aren't that many ways of doing it. Nonetheless, you still find variation in AFV design.